Parent of Quartz, Gizmodo to begin testing artificial intelligence

G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown told the staff of the company, which includes tech news site Gizmodo and financial news site Quartz, that it will begin testing AI-produced stories.

Brown writes:

Editorial team,

I am writing to advice you of a new context feature that will be added into the mix at G/O publications. It shouldn’t be a surprise that we’ve done a significant amount of thinking about Artificial Intelligence, just as everyone in the media business has been doing of late. We’re convinced here that the changes AI will bring to the media and journalism worlds will be very meaningful, if difficult to predict with certainty, in 2023.

G/O is among many things a technology company employing great journalists as well as outstanding technology professionals. We are both a leading technology company and an editorial organization that covers technology in world class fashion across multiple sites. So it is utterly appropriate — and in fact our responsibility — to do all we can to develop AI initiatives relatively early in the evolution of the technology. Other media companies have used early generation AI products for some time, including the nation’s largest news organization, Associated Press, which has nearly a decade of experience using similar technology. I’m very familiar with those efforts at AP and elsewhere in the news business, and the technology has come a long way since then. Today’s Generative AI has taken those capabilities at AP and elsewhere to new levels of creativity and productivity.

As such, we’re rolling out a trial next week that’s designed to test our editorial and technological thinking about use of AI. This trial is producing just a handful of stories for most our sites that are basically built around lists and data. These features aren’t replacing work currently being done by writers and editors, and we hope that over time if we get these forms of content right and produced at scale, AI will, via search and promotion, help us grow out our audience.

This is an early, modest test. There will be errors, and they’ll be corrected as swiftly as possible. There will be future pilot projects, as well. These will all be designed to complement our journalism and give our editorial teams new tools to serve our audience.